


let it fall

by youaremarvelous



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: 5+1 Things, Broken Bones, Crying, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, M/M, Underage Drinking, first chapter is pre-kerberos, second chapter is post
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-19
Updated: 2018-10-19
Packaged: 2019-08-04 09:46:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16344470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youaremarvelous/pseuds/youaremarvelous
Summary: The thing about banishing emotions to the forbidden parts of your memory is that, sooner or later, they’re going to find their way out again.or5 times Shiro saw Keith cry + the 1 time their roles were reversed





	let it fall

**Author's Note:**

> working title: big boys _do_ cry

In retrospect, encouraging Keith to try speeding down a makeshift ramp to jump a 20-foot saguaro was maybe not Shiro’s most responsible moment. He could already hear Adam’s ‘I told you so’s’ beating against his subconscious as he gathered Keith onto his hoverbike, apologies slipping from his tongue like a leaky faucet.

 

They were more for him than anything. Keith was pale, holding his swollen arm tight to his chest, but he hadn’t uttered a word of complaint since rocketing over his handlebars minutes earlier and splattering across the rocky terrain with a nauseating crunch.

 

When he finally did speak— a palm-sweating drive and finger-drumming waiting room hold later— it was to ask if the injury would keep him from participating in sims.

 

Shiro pressed his lips together and mentally weighed the reassuring untruths part and parcel to being a good friend against the responsibility of acting as a mentor. “It’s up to the doctor, buddy,” he conceded, shifting the blame like he figured any good adult might.

 

Keith slumped in his seat, wincing when the movement jostled his injury. Shiro’s brain treated him to an unwanted second showing of Keith’s airborne trajectory. The brilliant smear of red against a perfect blue sky before his hand met the ground and his arm snapped back like a dry noodle.

 

It certainly looked more noodle than arm cradled in Keith’s lap, bowed awkwardly in the middle of his forearm.   

 

Shiro squeezed his shoulder. “You holding up okay?”

 

Keith nodded tightly and swallowed. Shiro could see sweat dotting his forehead, matting his tangled hair to his face.    

 

“You can complain,” Shiro told him. He would tell him to cry if he thought there was a snowball’s chance in hell he would. “It might help the pain a little.”

 

Keith stared at the ancient wall-mounted tv on the far wall. It was tuned to a weather forecast on the Santa Anas, a pernicious wildfire fanning up the Southern California coast. “I’m fine,” he said after a moment, voice a scrape.

 

Shiro couldn’t begrudge him the obvious lie. He’d paved the path of his own illness with hand waves and fake smiles. Sometimes, he grew tired of the looks of pity and unsolicited advice. Sometimes, acting like his disease would never hold him back was the only way to believe it.

 

Still, Shiro had to question Keith’s definition of “fine” when a nurse finally ushered them to a curtained off hospital bed and he settled for all of ten seconds before dry heaving over the side.

 

“Shock,” the nurse explained calmly and handed Keith an emesis bag.

 

Shiro tried to mirror her nonchalance but failed spectacularly when the sour smell hit the back of his throat and made him gag into his hand. He tried to play it off as a cough—eyes watering—and wished not for the first time that Adam was here with him. He’d chew Shiro out six ways to Sunday for encouraging improper use of Garrison-issue hoverbikes, but at least he’d have thought to wrangle up Keith’s insurance information before he was wrapped up in plaster and gauze and doped to the gills with painkillers.

 

Keith’s image of Shiro as a paragon of maturity had fallen away months ago, burned up like dry desert brush somewhere between the cliff jumps and late-night Garrison jailbreaks. Shiro tried to demonstrate good behavior, but he was his ally more than anything. An example of how to channel anger into success, sure, but mostly a friendly face and encouraging presence in a world hellbent on reminding Keith where he belonged and what he’d amount to.

 

If Adam had his way, Shiro would keep Keith at arm’s length—leave his role as a mentor at intermittent tutoring and occasional tough love rule enforcement. But he didn’t get it. He didn’t see the way Keith’s face lit up brighter than a supermoon when Shiro smuggled him out of his dorm in the middle of the night for gas station Cokes and Leonids gazing. He didn’t see the way the star-studded sky stretched out before him like a road, ripe with endless opportunity.

 

“So it’s pretty cool that your cast matches your jacket,” Shiro commented lamely when he and Keith buckled into their Uber back to the Garrison. He could tell how stilted it sounded, upward inflected like he was talking to a toddler and not an injured and disgruntled 15-year-old.

 

Keith leaned his head against the car window and shut his eyes, bright red cast slung in his lap like Hellboy’s right hand of doom. As long as his anger’s fuse tended to be regarding anything Shiro-related, even he had his limit. Being told he’d have to lay off sims or any kind of strenuous activity for a minimum of 6 weeks sat firmly within those parameters.   

 

Shiro shifted his attention to direct the driver back to his apartment instead of the dorms. He’d love to keep Keith away from Adam until the cast was off and the devil-may-care attitude reemerged, but the thought of turning Keith away to the 3 by 6 feet of pulverized, piss yellow polyurethane fiber the Garrison dared to call a bed turned his stomach with guilt. Adam would see him in class, anyway. Shiro would be saving himself a half a day at most before the admonishments rained down. First, for modeling reckless activities. Second, for trying to hide it.

 

Keith didn’t comment when Shiro helped him out of the car and steered him towards the couch. Shiro suspected that had more to do with the drugs stuffing his brain with cotton than any kind of silent treatment enforced grudge. Keith wasn’t the type, anyway. His words flew as fast as his sims scores, to the testament of an extensive record of petty brawls.

 

“You need anything?” Shiro propped a pillow under Keith’s arm and draped a blanket over his knees. “Water? A snack? The doctor said we could try icing it if you’re in any pain.”

 

“No,” Keith croaked.

 

“You want me to turn on a movie?”

 

Keith leaned into the cushions, shaking his head in short, jerky increments. His mouth twisted around whatever he meant to say, and Shiro watched. He waited for Keith to lay into him like he would his classmates—to vent his frustrations in the only way he knew how. Instead, startlingly, concernedly, his eyes welled with tears.

 

“I’m sorry,” Keith finally managed. The apology was pinched from his throat, more breath than anything.  

 

“Hey, no,” Shiro soothed after the brief moment it took him to recover from the shock. He kneeled at Keith’s side and squeezed his knee. “It’s not your fault you got hurt.”

 

Shiro shouldn’t be surprised that the words left his mouth at the exact moment Adam walked through the door—the trajectory of his day had consistently angled towards surmounting levels of misfortune—but he was, anyway.

 

“Who’s hurt?” He asked, allaying any hope Shiro had harbored that he’d missed the comment. Adam didn’t even bother walking the few paces to the right to deposit his satchel on its hook. He just dropped it right there in the entryway and marched across the floor, a flurry of student essays scattering dramatically in his wake. “What happened? Why is Keith in a cast?”

 

Shiro sucked a breath into the bottom of his lungs, collecting his thoughts in preparation of the oncoming onslaught. “There was a little bit of an accident.”

 

“An accident?”

 

“I accelerated too late,” Keith unhelpfully explained.

 

Adam turned to Shiro, eyebrows pushing towards his hairline.

 

“He crashed his hoverbike.”

 

“Takashi,” Adam said in the tone Shiro has always hated. Like he was Adam’s kid instead of his boyfriend.

 

“It’s my fault,” Keith interjected, graveled out and watery and not at all helping Shiro’s case. “I knew the gears were being sticky, I should’ve—”

 

“No,” Adam cut him off firmly. “This isn’t your fault. You can’t even borrow a hoverbike without a chaperone.”

 

“He’s right, buddy—” Shiro agreed. “Those things are ancient, I should’ve made sure everything was operating properly before we went riding.” And before they went jumping 100-year-old cacti, but Adam didn’t need to know that part.

 

Keith conceded the point easily enough. He nodded, eyelids sinking slowly, fanning his eyelashes over his cheeks. It was out of character for him to go down without a fight, but even he was no match for the joint effort of the painkillers and general trauma, dragging him into unconsciousness like an ineludible tide.

 

Adam shot Shiro a look that warned a longer talk was still to come, but he let the argument fall away for the moment, busying himself with tucking another pillow under Keith’s arm and digging through the freezer for a bag of peas.

 

Watching him pour over his laptop, researching calcium-rich meals to expedite broken bone recovery, Shiro remembered again why he loved him, despite their difference of opinion on mentorships and the general infallibility of rules.

 

“Do I even want to know what happened?” Adam asked midway through typing up an email to explain Keith’s absence to his RA. Yet another thing Shiro hadn’t even considered.

 

Shiro played back the mental reel of Keith scrambling up in a cloud of dust, arm wobbling back at an unnatural angle like it had been transmuted into rubber. “I love you,” he said, leaning into Adam’s side, turning his face into Adam’s shoulder, “and no.”

 

+

 

“Takashi.”

 

Shiro jerked awake, pulled from a vivid dream about astral lions chasing him across the milky way. He rolled his face into his pillow and mumbled something vaguely resembling a response, awake enough to know a reply was expected but not quite enough to make it coherent.

 

“Takashi,” Adam whisper-yelled again, this time with a knee to the ribs for emphasis. “Someone’s calling you.”

 

“Mmrph. Okay, _okay_. I got it.” Shiro patted around blindly until he located his phone, buzzing insistently on the nightstand. He pressed it to his ear, not even bothering to open his eyes before answering.

 

“Hello?”

 

“Shiro?” Keith’s raspy voice slurred from the receiver. It was barely audible over the roar of what sounded like wind, rustling his reception with static.  

 

“Yeah?” Shiro replied slowly, propping himself up against the headboard. Keith had been the last person he’d suspected for the past midnight menace. He didn’t seem distressed—maybe just mildly disoriented—but it didn’t stop Shiro’s heart from kicking up its pace. “What’s going on? Where are you?”

 

“I dunno,” Keith said, louder this time. He was panting into the phone like his face was pressed against it. “I can’t remember.”

 

“How do you not remember?” Shiro reached over to flip on the bedside lamp, his heart in his throat.

 

Keith groaned. It was a low, rumbling sound like when he was doped to the ears on percocet a little more than a year ago. Keith wasn’t on painkillers, though, at least not as far as Shiro knew. A semester’s worth of requisite substance resistance courses flashed through Shiro’s memory banks: cocaine, meth, uppers, downers, sidewaysers.

 

Shiro reached for the least alarming option. “Are you... _drunk_?”

 

Adam sat up and grabbed his glasses from the nightstand. “Who’s drunk?”

 

Shiro ignored him, turning away to plant his feet on the floor.

 

“Maybe,” Keith mumbled, and Shiro was going to kill him. He was going to kill him if a coyote didn’t get to him first.

 

“Send me a location pin, okay?” Shiro encouraged, already stepping into a discarded pair of jeans. “I’ll come pick you up.” He tried to keep the anger out of his voice. The last thing he needed was Keith wandering further into the desert, drunk and defenseless, driven by some skewed sense of honor. He considered his effort a success when Keith mumbled his agreement and Shiro’s phone chimed with a text.

 

“What’s going on?” Adam asked as Shiro stuffed his phone in his pocket and threw a shirt over his head.

 

Shiro considered telling him the truth. Adam was his partner— in life and in work—and he knew he was setting a poor precedent for their future by lying to him now, but Adam operated on a code of ethics that was governed by the school and left little room for leeway. If he found out Keith had gotten drunk and wandered out of the dorms past curfew, he’d have him turned over to student conduct, no questions asked.

 

Technically, Adam wasn’t wrong, but he was blind to the complexity of the situation. Shiro had been subject to enough office meetings to know, where any other student’s act of rebellion was punishable but not representative of their overall morality, for Keith, every wrongdoing was proof of his innate character defects.

 

Shiro was one of Keith’s few advocates, one of his few _friends._  While he intended to chew him out as soon as he scooped his skinny ass out of the desert, he wasn’t going to betray his trust by reporting his mistakes to a higher authority. At least, not until it became an ongoing problem.  

 

“It’s Matt,” Shiro lied in a tumble, chest burning with guilt. “He’s drunk, I’m gonna pick him up and bring him home.”

 

“Can’t he call an Uber?”

 

“His Dad is spearheading the Kerberos mission, babe. I’m not gonna tell him to screw off and call an Uber.”

 

Adam pressed his lips together, clearly not happy, but either too resigned or too tired to argue.

 

Shiro didn’t hang around for a fight to manifest. Their points of difference had been mounting as the reality of trading Shiro the student for Shiro the pilot loomed closer, and he didn’t want Keith wandering further away while he went head to head with another petty couple’s tiff. He was pissed at Keith for being so reckless, but he didn’t _actually_ want a coyote to eat him.

 

Shiro tossed on his old leather jacket and booked it out of his apartment without so much as an “I love you” or “be safe” skirting his heels. The only sound was his motorcycle mincing up the quiet, the determined thrum of his pulse in his ear. He had a kid to rescue, so he tried not to let Adam's reticence bother him.

 

Thankfully  , Keith was only a couple of miles out from the school.  He sat perched on a beveled out dune he and Shiro used to stargaze from before Shiro got too busy with his obligations as a senior to spend his time staring at the stars instead of chasing after them .

 

“Keith,” Shiro called, swinging off the hoverbike and jogging the last few paces across the hard-packed sand. He cuffed the back of Keith’s head just hard enough to catch his attention, maybe knock a little sense into his alcohol-soaked brain. “What the hell were you thinking?”

 

Keith barely acknowledged his existence. He had his arms wrapped around his knees, eyes fixed unblinking at the moon. “‘M sorry,” he slurred after a long moment.

 

“Sorry doesn’t begin to cover it,” Shiro replied, fully aware that he sounded more like a middle-aged Mom than a spry Garrison senior in his early twenties. “How’d you even get your hands on—”

 

“Beer,” Keith filled in the blank for him. “One beer. Some of the guys in the dorm had ‘em.” He pushed his fingers into his eyes. “Was s’pposed to be a Christmas party.”

 

Guilt simmered through Shiro’s stomach. He’d been encouraging Keith to hang out with his classmates for months now, and despite his irritation at being dragged from bed at ass o’clock at night, he couldn’t help but chart his own culpability in the night’s proceedings. He dug his heels into the dirt and turned his head to the sky, searching the stars for his next move.

 

“Okay,” Shiro relented with a sigh, “so then how’d you end up out here?”

 

Keith’s throat bobbed. He bowed his head in turbulent silence, and Shiro settled next to him. Their borders washed across the hills, ink-blotted in Rorsarch patterns.

 

Time swelled in distant pearl-drop quail calls, the citrus pink light limning the horizon. Shiro didn’t want to rush Keith into a confession, but he worried about his ability to sneak him back to the dorms if they waited much longer.

 

“Keith,” Shiro prompted. He craned his neck to look at him, half expecting to find him asleep. But Keith’s eyes were open—tired, but not in the way Shiro expected. It was a bone-deep exhaustion, like the dark and the beer had conspired against him to excavate every scrap of trauma he’d entombed in his memory.

 

Shiro splayed a hand over his back. “Do you want to talk about it?”

 

Keith swallowed and swallowed again. A single tear rolled down the sharp slope of his cheek, and he reared back like he’d been shot. He wiped the wetness away with the flat of his palm, clenching his teeth into his bottom lip, his fists into his knees. “I shouldn’t have called you.”

 

“I’m glad you did,” Shiro told him, rubbing circles over his back.

 

Keith recoiled from his touch. “I can’t keep—” His voice pinched off and he tilted his chin to the sky, screwing his whole face around the effort to choke everything down and back into place.

 

“Hey,” Shiro soothed, soft as soil, “take it easy.”

 

Keith shook his head like he was trying to erase a thought from it. “Am I your pet project?” He spat.

 

The accusation caught Shiro by complete surprise. His mouth hung open like a gasping fish, hooked on a line. “Are you— _what_?”

 

“Am I?” Keith thundered. He turned to face Shiro, wild eyes piercing the inky twilight—sharp as a dagger.

 

Shiro watched his features emerge from the dark, carved in the moon’s misty light. His windblown hair, his permanently furrowed eyebrows, the mottled purple nebula, blooming under his eye.

 

Shiro hissed, fighting the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. If Adam were here, he’d most definitely be wearing his most smug ‘I told you so’ face.

 

“You got in a fight.” It wasn’t a question.

 

Keith jerked his face away again, his shoulders heaving from how heavily he was breathing.

 

“What happened?”

 

“Nothing I can’t handle,” Keith mumbled, the statement plucked from between his teeth, endearingly dramatic.

 

Shiro could fill in the blanks well enough, anyway. Keith had gotten drunk, he’d loosened the lid on his emotions, he’d probably been teased about his relationship with Shiro. It wasn’t the first time, and despite Shiro’s desperate wish that everyone would learn to leave well enough alone, it probably wouldn’t be the last.

 

“You’re my friend,” he told Keith, because it was the truth. Whatever their relationship had constituted at its inception, it had stopped being singularly beneficial ages ago.

 

Keith’s jaw visibly worked around whatever he wanted to say.

 

“I wouldn’t be hauling your scrawny ass out of the desert at the crack of dawn if you weren’t.” Shiro knocked their shoulders together with just enough force to half-topple Keith into the sand. He wouldn’t lie to his boyfriend for him, either, but Keith didn’t need to know that part.

 

Keith wiped a bony wrist under his nose. “‘M not scrawny.”

 

“Yeah, right, tough guy.” Shiro rolled his eyes, playfully mocking. He stood, dusting the dirt from the back of his jeans.

 

“I could kick your ass if I wanted to.”

 

Shiro held out a hand, and Keith reached up to take it.

 

“You’re welcome to try,” Shiro smiled with the same kind of smug look he wore whenever he beat Keith on their hoverbike races across the cliffs  .  His winning streak wouldn’t last long, Keith was growing stronger and flying better every day, but he’d enjoy it while it lasted .

 

Shiro clasped his hand in Keith’s and tugged him out of the sand, then further, overbalancing him into a hug. To his surprise, Keith didn’t resist it. He pressed his forehead into Shiro’s collarbone, trembling in his arms like a flame caught in the breeze. Shiro could feel the warm wet of his breath seeping through his t-shirt, flushing his chest with goose pimples. It struck him not for the first time how precious Keith was, how it was impossible to predict the impact a person could have on your life until they were dropped into it.

 

“You’re alright,” Shiro whispered into his hair, too quiet for even Keith to hear over the deep lowing of the evening winds.

 

When they pulled apart again, Shiro shrugged off his jacket and slung it over Keith’s shoulders. “Can we please try to avoid any more late night crises until I graduate?” He asked, rustling up Keith’s hair for good measure. “I’m getting too old for all-nighters.”

 

Keith batted away Shiro’s hand with a wheezy laugh.

 

He didn’t reply just then, but he didn’t need to. His and Shiro’s relationship had never been one that required extensive elaboration. It was part of what made being around each other so easy.

 

Shiro drove them back to the dorm, the first signs of morning warming the horizon. Adam would be up soon and Shiro would inevitably face another argument about the importance of prioritizing his relationship over his job, but for the moment he lost himself in the weight of Keith’s arms wrapped around his waist, the heart’s flutter of impending trouble stirring in his chest.

 

+

 

“Shiro.”

 

Shiro paused mid-sentence. He’d been walking Keith around the launch area for the better part of an hour, rattling on about escape velocity and guidance systems and expertly side-stepping anything resembling a real human emotion.

 

“Are you sure this is okay?” Keith asked, squinting up at him, his hand shielding his eyes from the sun.

 

Shiro felt his hackles raising out of habit. “Me going on the mission?”

 

Keith whipped his head back, eyes wide. “No, not...no one would be a better choice than you. I just mean…are you sure you want _me_ to be the one to see you off?”

 

“Keith—” Shiro wilted, pent-up adrenaline draining to his feet—“of course.”

 

“But wouldn’t you rather...” Keith trailed off, the implication hanging between them like a flat-bottomed storm cloud. It was a game they played a lot recently, connecting the dots between loaded silences, the things still too delicate to say.

 

“Hey—” Shiro squeezed his shoulder—“we’re family, aren’t we?”

 

Keith’s mouth tilted into an impish smile. “I dunno. Would family steal all my fries at dinner?”

 

“They would if they cared.”

 

Keith rolled his eyes to the side as Commander Holt’s voice broke between them.

 

“Alright, Matt, Shiro, time to get a move on.”  

 

Shiro elbowed Keith in the ribs. “Now’s the part when you tell me how much you’re gonna miss me.”

 

“I’ll be too busy beating all your records to miss you,” Keith told him, arms folded over his chest.

 

Shiro’s eyebrows raised to his hairline. “Oh yeah?”

 

“I’m just saying enjoy the fanfare while it lasts. I’ll make it even further than you someday, and it’s not gonna be for some stupid ice cubes.”

 

“Stupid _space_ ice cubes,” Shiro corrected, just to be petty. He held out a hand and Keith took it.

 

“I’m gonna miss you, buddy,” Shiro said, pulling him into a hug. He closed his eyes to imprint the moment to memory. The overbright sun beating against their necks, the subtle scents of laundry detergent and sweat, spindly arms wrapped around him, too long for Keith’s height.

 

Shiro wondered how tall Keith would be when he got back, how many more people will have enfolded their presence into him.

 

He wondered why the thought of it made him ache.

 

“I’ll miss you, too,” Keith mumbled into Shiro’s chest. “Have fun,” he added when he pulled away.

 

“Yeah—” Shiro‘s heart bucked—“I will.”

 

The elevator ride from the hangar to the spacecraft couldn’t have taken more than ten seconds. Ten tiny seconds. But they stretched out infinitely for the regularity with which Shiro reflected on them.

 

In the following year, he learned to measure time in heavy footfalls, surging crowds howling for his death, the desperation to survive, transmuting his blood into iron, his muscle into steel.

 

But in those ten seconds, time, space, everything, was Keith.

 

Shiro watched him from the platform, a blot of Garrison orange and white, shoulders square, proud. Then folding, a hand pressed over his mouth, Mrs. Holt pulling him to her side.  

 

Ten seconds, a lifetime, lost in the tide of one tiny person towards whom Shiro inextricably drifted.

 

“Ready, boys?” Commander Holt’s voice pulled him back to the present.

 

“As I’ll ever be,” Matt replied, a smile in his voice.

 

Shiro flashed a thumb’s up, the knot in his throat obstructing his ability to speak.

 

This was it. T-minus ten.

 

The finish line of a dream he’d been chasing since childhood, the beginning of a life he could’ve never predicted.

**Author's Note:**

> title inspired by the [lykke li song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt69TDI3BHo)
> 
> you know it really doesn't sink in just how much shiro lost until you write pre-kerberos shiro sleeping through someone calling his phone. can somebody pls protect my children, I am begging you. 
> 
> also for a second imagine with me how fucking pissed adam would be when he has to go to bed alone because his boyfriend is out stargazing with his " _mentee"_  
>   
>   
>  **shiro:** you said you needed an early night, babe, I thought I was doing you a favor!
> 
>  **adam:** I will unhinge my jaw and consume you whole  
>   
> 
> you can come yell at me about how much of a dumb butt (/disaster gay) shiro is for not realizing that prioritizing your friend over your bf is probably not a great sign on [tumblr](http://youremarvelous.tumblr.com/) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/marvyarts)
> 
> thanks y'all! (& second chapter is going to be post-kerberos, so like, bring on the hurty)


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